Rawr! This user remembers a kinder, gentler Wikipedia, before the meteor killed everyone.
An old-timer who has been here since the very, very early days (I know Larry Sanger if that helps gives you a sense of time). In the days before tilde-signing, we used to just write our initials (that's how few of us there were). I am hence regularly found in the old stuff under MMGB. I'm Wikipedia user #100, but that's only because they turned on the user registration system while I was asleep. (I'm #3 on Meta).
I joined the 'pedia around the time it hit 10,000 articles, somewhere in mid-2001. Those were the days when you could get to know every single editor on the project. I was a member of the first group of admins ever appointed. Apart from creating and developing many, many articles, I was instrumental in many of the earliest decisions about Wikipedia policy and structure, such as the fleshing out of WP:NPOV (as developed by Jimbo), the creation of Meta (all of the policy discussions were held in the main 'pedia - we had no namespaces), and the development of the first management system for editing utilities.
I live in Sydney Australia, for what it's worth, and I'm 52. My user name is my real name. My Wikipedian style is Exopedian. I would estimate that around 90% of my article editing has been done anonymously. Some people find this weird, but I like just getting things done and not worrying about who did it.
